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Lady Gaga: Mayhem review – a fabulous return to her freaky first principles

After some noteworthy musical and cinematic misfires, Gaga gets back to her core themes of sex, sleaze and celebrity on an album that sounds not retro, but relevant

In the debit, there was her starring role in the disastrous Joker: Folie à Deux, a film that was estimated to have lost Warner Brothers something in the region of $150m (£116m), and which seemed to take both the Gaga-heavy soundtrack and her own, jazz-based “companion album” Harlequin down with it. The fact that you never quite know what she’s going to throw out next – electronic dance-pop, soft rock, jazz, country, AOR – should be cause for celebration, but perhaps it has proved a bit much in a world dominated by streaming’s overload, where artists are advised to maintain a clear brand lest they get lost amid the sheer torrent of new music. The Prince-esque electro-funk of Killah suddenly erupts into a double-time beat that’s equal parts clipped new-wave rock and techstep drum’n’bass; the Chic-style disco of Zombieboy is unexpectedly disrupted by a widdly-woo hair metal guitar solo.

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